Martha "Patty" Stahr Carpenter obtained a BA degree from Wellesley College 1941, majoring in astronomy and building her own telescope for variable star observations. She went on to graduate studies and received her MS (1943) and PhD (1945) in astronomy from the University of California at Berkeley. She taught astronomy at Wellesley College from 1945-1947, then at Cornell University from 1950 until 1968, where she was the first woman faculty member in the College of Arts and Sciences. She represented the Astronomy Department in the radio-wave astronomy project operated jointly with the School of Electrical Engineering, and developed and taught a number of undergraduate and graduate astronomy courses. In 1954-1955, during a year in Australia, she used the Potts Hill radio telescope to observe 21-cm radio waves from hydrogen, and was co-author of papers with Kerr and Hindman that combined northern and southern hemisphere data in mapping the galaxy. She completed her career as an associate professor of astronomy at the University of Virginia, retiring in 1986.